Inside The Civic at the Broadview Hotel

The Civic (106 Broadview, at Queen East, 416-362-8439, thebroadviewhotel.ca) is the flagship full-service restaurant at the Broadview Hotel. Four months on from the Broadview’s grand re-opening, the Civic’s turn-of-the-century-chic dining room is finally open, adding a more stately culinary presence to the casual breakfasts and lunches served in the adjoining lobby café and the modern, multicultural party eats upstairs.

“The menu’s rooted in the history of the building – a Victorian, British Empire diaspora sort of era,” says executive chef John Sinopoli (Table 17, Ascari Enoteca). “We wanted to create a menu that was really only of Toronto, something you wouldn’t necessarily see in other places. It’s the kind of dishes that were served 80, 90, 100 years ago, but obviously, through the lens of modern taste and execution.”

The hotel’s revitalization, as a whole, was driven by the building’s history – in one particularly literal case, DesignAgency, who spearheaded the transformation, actually replicated a 1900s-era wallpaper unearthed on the walls during the demolition.

But for the team behind the restaurant – Sinopoli, Erik Joyal and chef de cuisine Joey Agostino (Richmond Station, Skin and Bones) – there was no such legacy to follow. Sinopoli says the original Broadview Hotel didn’t even have a kitchen.

Instead, they delved into researching what was served around the city during the Broadview’s heyday.

“We found lots of menus from really cool restaurants and taverns and saloons,” Sinopoli says. “There was a place called Mart Ackerman’s Saloon that apparently was really popular, which existed where Roy Thomson Hall is now. King and Simcoe was very busy at the time. Lots of menus from the King Eddy, some from the Toronto Board of Trade.”

The result is dishes like rabbit terrine, oysters and lobster à l’Américaine, plus a few elegant twists of Canadiana like elk chops and deer tartare.

The cocktail menu similarly takes its cue from a bygone era. Bar manager Tony DaSilva (formerly of Baro) pored over classic tomes like The Savoy Cocktail Book for inspiration.

“Back then, if you had ice in a cocktail bar, you were a really rich person – so a lot of these are served neat,” he says. He also notes that old-school cocktails of that stripe – neat, room-temp – aren’t often seen in east-end bars and cocktail joints.

In fact, there’s not much about the Civic that has a local parallel; most east-end dining establishments go for coziness over all-out grandeur. But Sinopoli says he’s already seeing the locals embrace the Civic and the Broadview, as have the party crowds that have been queuing outside the elevator to the rooftop since opening day.

“We’re not just cooking for the neighborhood any more,” says Sinopoli. “We find we’re cooking for the entire GTA on any given night. That’s exciting. And lot of those people, if they can’t get up on the rooftop, will go to Eastbound or Prohibition or the Comrade or Tabule or all these other awesome places in the hood. We love that. It’s better for everyone.”

Sinopoli calls the massive Tamshire (a cross between Tamworth and Berkshire) pork T-bone the best value on the menu, at $30.

“There’s a good mix of fattiness, even though the meat is really lean. We brine it for about six hours, then get a really nice roast on it. It ends up cooking beautifully on the bone every time. The bone’s not huge, so it’s probably a full 16 ounces of pork.”

As with any classic steak house, sides are à la carte. Sinopoli recommends the pommes fondant (potatoes seared and slowly braised in a chicken-veal jus) and roasted carrots with caraway cream.

The lemon chiffon dessert might look like your classic pie slice, but each is actually painstakingly individually made and topped with a mirror glaze by pastry chef Sarah Battye (ex-Spoke Club). Sinopoli calls the pie “a really a nice microcosm of what we do here: take something old, keep the goodness that makes it good, and just present it like we would do in 2017.”